Basic Studio Shoot
By William Lulow
Here was a great opportunity to get back to basics with studio lighting techniques. It was a rather straight-forward job involving a designer/art director client and two of her own clients who wanted images for their new website. My client had told me that she wanted a plain, white no-seam background so that a retoucher could easily mask the subjects and put them in another, painted background. So, they needed a white background.
As I have mentioned often, backgrounds need to be lit separately from subjects if you want them rendered a specific color. White is fairly easy. This was my setup:
Instead of using my back lights as accents, I turned them around, mounted small umbrellas in them and lit the background. Here’s an idea of what it actually looked like:
Behind my black gobos were the umbrellas:
I had one of these small umbrellas mounted on each side of the set to assure complete coverage. These lights were also set to be one f/stop brighter than the mainlight, which was my big, portrait umbrella. You can easily set this up by making sure that the power to these lights is twice as bright as the power to the main light.
Here’s what the shot looked like from behind the camera:
Here’s what the finished shot looked like:
And here was a test background added:
So, if you plan everything, test your lights and have a direction for each shoot, you should have no trouble achieving the results you are after. The studio setup should be flexible and reliable so that you can have a consistency to your results as well.
